Blog

16-Nov-2007 technology and much more

Allan Taylor concert, Edirol R-09 digital recorder, new song mp3 added to the website – all in the space of 2 days. Yes, we’ve had a very busy time of it.

10:00 on the morning of November 15 saw us visiting Soundware in Osborne Road, Newcastle. We were there to pick up a neat piece of technology (“another new gadget” sighs Val) which should give us the ability to capture song ideas easily without the fuss of wires and microphones and mixers and computers. It’s a pocket-sized digital recorder… Edirol R-09 (by Roland). It records to a flash card using either external or internal microphones, and can be plugged into the computer via USB to transfer the files.

Later that day Allan Taylor called in for a visit before going on to Ashington Folk Club for the evening concert. He played our collection of Taylors – a real treat for us – and we experimented a little with our new toy. After a bite to eat it was off to Ashington in convoy to set up the gear and sound check.

The concert was great! After setting up his own sound Allan made sure the gear was adjusted perfectly for the support act (jiva of course! – who else could it be?). This left us plenty of time to welcome people and be our usual, genial selves as hosts for the evening. At 8:30 prompt we kicked off the night with 4 songs – Val playing the Taylor 855 12-string and Jimmy the Taylor 910CE-L7 6-string. The sound was magical – thanks, Allan. Then, special guest for the evening, Allan Taylor did 2 wonderful sets mixing old and new (as yet unrecorded/unreleased) songs… delivered with interesting anecdotes and superb guitar playing complementing his rich voice. All too soon it was 11:00 pm and the show was over… a wonderful night – there could be no better person to have as the last guest under jiva’s stewardship of the folk club. (Read the full review of the concert on the Ashington Folk Club website.)

Then it was home to wind down with a light snack and some really good French wine courtesy of Allan. Not many hours, and not much sleep, later the alarm clocks announced it was 04:00 am – it was an early start for Allan as he had a 170 mile drive to catch a ferry to Ireland for some gigs over there. Jimmy and Val then grabbed some more shut-eye.

During the afternoon of November 16 we experimented some more with our new gadget… we tried using the internal mics and an external one that Jimmy had used years before with a digital video camcorder. The results were very encouraging – so much so that we’ve added to the website an mp3 of a song we recorded with the Edirol. No fancy tricks, no post processing… the recording is literally the two of us singing/playing to the external mic attached to our new gadget. We won’t tell you which song it is – you’ll have to visit our Songs page to find it!

Needless to say, we are very happy with the new ‘toy’ – we’ve already recorded some new ideas which will hopefully lead to new songs in the jiva performance repertoire.

Our next few scheduled appearances are shown below... details of these, and later gigs, are on our Gig List page. Additionally, we regularly pop in to residents nights and singarounds to do the occasional floor spot.